Crowds gathering for the IEOA Truck Light Parade recently received a bit of a pre-show and a first hand glimpse into what it's like being a firefighter as Colwood Fire Rescue tended to a motor vehicle incident on Island Highway

Colwood Fire Dept. endures busy week of calls

Extreme weather may have resulted in the closure of Ocean Boulevard along the Esquimalt Lagoon in recent days, but it was not the reason the Colwood Fire Department fielded so many calls.

Crews responded to a large number of incidents which ranged in severity, including seven on Dec. 7 alone.

“That doesn’t happen too often,” said Fire Chief Kerry Smith.

From Dec. 5 to 12, Colwood crews responded to 16 emergency calls, not including such non-emergency calls as public assists they also attended through the week.

Smith has looked at the number of calls the department has responded to over the course of the year and was a little surprised to see the 2015 numbers are very similar to those in 2014.

As of late last week, the department had responded to roughly 430 emergency calls. Those numbers have been fairly consistent over the past five years.

“We grow in population, (but) our calls are pretty much the same,” he said. “Sooner or later that’ll swing the other way.”

One call last week ended up flooding social media. A garbage truck travelling on Metchosin Road failed to make the left turn onto Sooke Road and ended up in the ditch. “They had to close the intersection to pull him out,” Smith said, adding “Metchosin Road used to go through many years ago.”

The cause of that crash wasn’t clear. But while crews were ready to handle an influx of weather-related calls, Smith said, they didn’t come in.

“We thought with the ground being saturated more trees would be coming down. We’ve been lucky.”